


At dusk

by imsfire



Series: The Jem Chronicles [3]
Category: The Town (2010)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, just two guys chatting, memories and regrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 02:52:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1250020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just two friends talking idly of an evening...</p>
            </blockquote>





	At dusk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badcircuit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badcircuit/gifts).



It’s a mild spring evening and the street is quiet when someone comes out onto the front step of the house with the big grassy yard. The sky is a darkening clear blue overhead, fading a little in the west, and the sun has sunk down among the buildings, but it won’t be full dusk for another hour.  
The young man sits down on the stoop, stretching out his legs, and pulls out a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his dirty sweat pants. He lights up and relaxes, leaning back against the doorframe and contemplating the street.  
He has brought a coffee mug out with him, half-full of clear golden-brown liquid. No steam rises from the cup, though he sips its contents as gently as if it were hot. He rubs a hand over the close-cropped fuzz of his fair hair and scratches his scalp; takes another sip, another puff of tobacco.  
The screen door behind him clicks open and closes again, and another young man comes out; a tall guy, with rangy limbs and dark hair. He’s carrying a bottle of coke.  
“Whatcha doin?”  
“Nuthin.”  
“What’dja come out for? Ya don’t usually go outside for a smoke…”  
The fair-haired man glances at him, impassive. “It’s a nice night.”  
“A nice night?”  
“Yeah…”  
“Ya turning philosophical on me now?”  
“Fuck you!” says the fair man, laughing like a barrel of gravel rolling over. “It’s nice to be outdoors sometimes. It’s mild. The air’s mild. Thank fuckin’ Christ. It’s spring, Dougie.”  
“Yeah. It’s spring.”  
The second man is about to settle down too, then he thinks again and goes back indoors. The smoker stays, sipping his cup of gold and smoking his smoke, wriggling his bare feet in the short grass at the foot of the steps. After a minute the other emerges again and tosses down a plastic supermarket snack-pack on the threshold between them. “There y’are. Have a peanut. And I brought yer bottle.” He sets down a green glass whisky bottle, still half full, and then sits, taking over the whole of the further jamb as he leans his big frame back.  
The fair man is already topping up his mug. “Want some?”  
“Nope,” says the big guy, in the tone of someone who has said that particular Nope a great many times. He rips the peanut bag, then cracks his coke open as his buzz-headed friend chortles.  
They sit; drinking, smoking, munching nuts as they watch the evening light begin to soften over the street.  
A pair of neighbourhood girls go by over the way, carrying bags of shopping and big purses, walking slinky in new heels and short skirts. They look over and one of them waves.  
“Hi, ladies!” calls the big guy, waving back and smiling.  
“Oh, hi, Doug – Dougie, hi… Hi, Jem…”  
“Huh,” says Jem with a half-toss of his head. They giggle and go on up the road.  
Doug aims a vague kick in his direction. “Asshole!”  
“Asshole yaself! What’d I do? Fuck you…”  
“Don’t go all ‘what’d I do?’ like that. Ya know what I mean. Ya love it.”  
“What the fuck?”  
“I get ‘oh, hi Dougie, hi Doug’ like I’m their brother. You get all the breathy voices and the pause and the giggle and the wiggle. Ya love it. Don’t pretend to me ya don’t. Yer fucking catnip.”  
“Catnip…” Jem thinks and drinks for a minute, and an evil grin spreads across his face. “That’s that stuff cats roll on when they’re stoned, right? When they purr funny and drool?”  
“That’s the stuff.”  
“Ya think I let my women fuckin’ roll on me?!” He gathers up a handful of peanuts and shies them Doug’s way, smirking. “I got better things to do with a stoned pussy than that, you asshole…”  
“Ya don’t stop them drooling, though, do ya? Ya love it!”  
“Fuck you!”  
Half the remaining peanuts are on the grass by now, but the two friends are laughing. The girls, almost at the top of the road now, look back as Jem’s big grating laugh carries to them. They are giggling again as they turn the corner.  
Doug finishes his coke and tosses the empty plastic bottle into the yard. For a few minutes there’s silence. Jem refills his whisky again, and lights another cigarette, throwing the butt of the first at the coke bottle. He hits it, bulls-eye. They fall idly to picking up the scattered peanuts as ammo, peppering the bottle and making it hop about the grass as though it’s trying to get away.  
Even with three large whiskies in him, Jem’s aim is the better. But after a while they run out of nuts.  
It’s getting darker now, and the street lights are coming on in the blue urban dusk, in the mild spring evening. In one of the houses opposite a radio is playing in a second floor window, and someone moves back and forth across the square of light, busy in an apartment kitchen.  
Doug says thoughtfully “Didja ever meet a girl ya really liked? I mean, like, someone who made ya think about settling down? I just don’t know how anyone ever gets to doin that, settling down, I mean; how do ya know ya’ve met someone special?”  
“How the fuck would I know?” says Jem, irritated. “Ya screw my sister any more I’ll fuckin’ make ya settle down, is how. What is this bullshit?”  
“Bet yer dad was like that, once. Bet my dad was. They settled down. How’d ya know when you find that? How the hell are we meant to know?”  
“Whatcha fuckin’ askin’ me for?…” But then he falls silent, and for a long moment the cigarette burns unnoticed between his long fingers. His hard, strange face has gone quiet, as though all the sharp energies are turning inward. He frowns and his mouth goes broody.  
He says softly “There was this girl, once. Before Walpole…”  
“Fuck, really?” says Doug. He sounds completely astonished.  
“Yeah, really. She had the sense to find someone else. That’s my best answer, since yer dumb enough to think I got one. The ‘someone special’ is the one ya remember, after.”  
He gets to his feet, limber and powerfully graceful, a hard man with a wry smirk; at home in his skin and amused at having dumbfounded his friend.  
“I’m hungry. Gonna make some eggs. Ya want some?”  
He wanders in through the screen door, letting it bang shut behind him. Doug, alone in the dusk, calls after him too late “Can ya get me another coke?”  
“Fuck you!” comes the answer, but a few seconds later the screen door opens and a new bottle is dropped in his lap. “There ya go…” Jem says.  
He picks up the bottle of Jameson he had left on the porch, and takes a pull from it; and stands, looking out across the town, in the dusk, beside his friend. Looking out, thinking, silent.  
Then turns and goes in, to make eggs, and get on with his life.


End file.
